UPCOMING EVENTS

Dropbox is doubling down on its education efforts. The cloud storage service, which went public last year, today announced it has inked deals with Klaxoon, Pronto, and WeVideo to expand its productivity offerings.

San Francisco-headquartered Dropbox said WeVideo’s cloud-based video editing tool, Pronto’s real-time chat app, and Klaxoon’s polls, word clouds, and other interactive tools will now include a Dropbox integration. The integrations will go live today for all Dropbox users, a spokesperson told VentureBeat by email.

Dropbox said the new integrations will make it easier for users to share assignments, provide feedback, and collaborate in group settings. “Bringing Dropbox together with learning management systems and applications that boost student engagement helps schools prepare students to succeed in the workforce of tomorrow,” Dropbox education lead Marshall Kurtz said in a prepared statement.

Progress

Dropbox also shared an update on its progress in the highly sought-after education space: Between 2007 and 2018 the number of students, faculty, and administrators who enrolled in Dropbox Education, its offering for the education market, rose by almost 50 percent. Some of its new customers include Cal State Fullerton, University of Florida, and UNC Charlotte. Dropbox said that education users added more than 2.5 billion files to its cloud storage service last year.

The company said its users are increasingly engaging with integrations on the platform. Without disclosing actual numbers, it said there has been a 54 percent increase in individual users linking to one or more apps and a 33 percent increase among teams.

A Dropbox spokesperson declined to share the number of schools and colleges the cloud storage service has signed to date, the pricing of Dropbox Education (which at the time of the launch cost $49 per user a year), or the revenue it generates from Dropbox Education. On its website, the company says more than 6,000 schools use Dropbox Education — a figure it has not updated in years.

Today’s announcement expands the number of education partners Dropbox has. Since launching Dropbox Education in 2016, the company has partnered with, among others, Blackboard, Canvas, and Turnitin. But the service’s efforts to grab a slice of the education market, where it competes with Microsoft’s Office 365 for Education and Google’s G Suite for Education — both of which offer a productivity suite with cloud storage option — have been modest, at best.

The company remains bullish on the opportunities it sees in the education space, however. During an earnings call with investors last month, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston said the education vertical is important to the company because it “gives us the opportunity to evangelize our product with the next generation of knowledge workers.” He added “Each year, students graduate from universities and bring Dropbox with them into the workforce, while a new class of incoming students is introduced to our platform.”

In recent years, Dropbox has seemingly focused more on expanding its reach inside other services. In November, it announced Extensions — in a partnership with Vimeo and several other companies — which enabled Dropbox users to edit a range of files without ever leaving its service. In October, Dropbox was among the services that partnered with Google to support G Suite’s Gmail Add-ons. It has also inked similar partnerships to integrate Dropbox into video conferencing startup Zoom’s service, Salesforce’s Quip, and Apple’siOS, among others.